By Ron Hayes

    OCEAN RIDGE — William F. “Bill” Jackson, a resident of Delray Beach and Ocean Ridge for more than 20 years, died Sept. 21 at Wellington Regional Medical Center following surgery. He was 73.    “Bill was a wonderful neighbor. He always had a smile and a funny story to tell,” recalled his neighbor, Susan Carey. “He was our whole family’s favorite neighbor. He was our dog’s favorite neighbor, too, because she used to receive special gourmet treats from Bill in the mail. We all knew he cared about us and we cared about him, too.”
    Mr. Jackson also kept a fishing camp on Lake Okeechobee.
    “He was an electrician and carpenter by trade, but fishing was his main hobby,” recalled Marie Jackson, his “best friend and former wife” of 20 years. “He had a good sense of humor and enjoyed his children who visited each winter.”
    The two had been planning a river cruise of Germany and Switzerland in the fall, where Mr. Jackson served with the U.S. Army during the Korean War.
    Mr. Jackson was born June 18, 1938, in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. Following military service, he joined the electricians and carpenters unions, and owned his own construction company.
    He was a longtime member of the Elks and Moose clubs, and served as fire commissioner of the Wilton, N.Y., Fire Department.   
    In addition to his former wife, Mr. Jackson is survived by his children, Timothy Jackson, Mary Ann Dowd, Marlise Ford, all of Wilton, N.Y., and Lori McCann of York, S.C.; nine grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren.
    A private Mass was celebrated Oct. 1 in Wilton, N.Y., where Mr. Jackson was interred at Maplewood Cemetery.

By Emily J. Minor

GULF STREAM — Thomas Mulry, a lifelong financial adviser for the utilities industry who began coming to Gulf Stream in the early 1960s when he and his wife were just newlyweds, died Oct. 23 after a brief illness. He was 79.
“He loved the ocean,” said his daughter, Megan Huisinga. “He loved swimming in the ocean, and some of my favorite pictures of him are with his grandchildren on the beach.”
    A New York native, Mr. Mulry was the son of an insurance salesman and an art teacher in the public schools. He spent his childhood in Hewlett, Long Island, eventually serving two years in the U.S. Army, then moving into the city to begin his career in corporate finance and investment banking.
    Mr. Mulry met his wife, Margaret Power, at “an old-fashioned tea dance” in New York City, his daughter said, and the couple were married Dec. 28, 1959, in one of the side chapels at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
    When Mr. Mulry died, he and his wife had been married 51 years.
    The couple raised their five children mostly in Locust Valley, N.Y., and Mr. Mulry had two prestigious professional stints — first as president of Stone & Webster Securities, from 1972 to 1974; and then as managing director and, later, advisory director of PaineWebber Inc. Investment Banking Division. When Mr. Mulry retired from PaineWebber in 2000, the couple moved full-time to Gulf Stream.
    A disciplined man, Mr. Mulry was a bit of a paradox, Huisinga said. On one hand he was methodical and straightforward, yet he loved to sing and laugh and have a good time.
    “I think that he loved what made life absurd,” she said. “His favorite thing would be to have dinner with 10 friends and tell stories and have a great bottle of wine.”
    In Florida, he was a member of The Little Club and the Gulf Stream Bath and Tennis Club.
    Mr. Mulry suffered cancer about a decade ago, but recuperated to enjoy his retirement. Still, Huisinga said her father’s death was probably caused by a white cell abnormality resulting from that cancer treatment.
    He attended Mass at St. Vincent Ferrer Catholic Church every morning.
    In addition to his wife, Margaret, and his daughter, Megan Huisinga, who lives with her family in Delray Beach, other survivors include: Patricia Mulry of Lake Worth; Brooke Mulry of Lake Worth; Thomas C. Mulry Jr. of Boyce, Va.; and Sean F. Mulry, of Glen Cove, N.Y. Seven grandchildren also survive him, two of whom attend Gulf Stream School.
    After he died, the family found a note among his personal affairs, asking that any memorial donations be given to his old Catholic high school, Chaminade High School Development Fund, 350 Jackson Ave., Mineola, N.Y. 11501. Huisinga said her dad apparently made that decision when he had cancer, 10 years ago.

By Tim Norris

    Down from among the tall pines of Maine in 1980, David Bunting found a small, flowering tree arching over the driveway of his new home on Hypoluxo Island. He liked it well enough — “I’ve always liked trees,” he says — and then it grew on him.
    It was, he knew, an orange geiger, Cordia sebestena, a kind he had seen in the Bahamas. This one showed a lot of personality, its limbs thrusting south like the side-swept hairdo of a bygone movie star, and it would shower the drive with summer flowers and work its way into local legend.
    It fills the southern side of his U-shaped driveway, but he would never cut it back.
    Now the tree is a national champion. Walter Scott, a forester writing in American Forests magazine in September 1940, campaigned for a National Register of Big Trees, tended these days by the nonprofit American Forests, watched by arborists everywhere and overseen in this state by Charlie Marcus of the Florida Forest Service.
    Anyone looking in print or online can find the Hypoluxo reference, between an anachuita in Texas and a dogwood in New Jersey: “Geiger tree, height 19 feet, circumference (trunk) 39 inches, crown spread 22 feet.”
    An owner, Bunting says, can take pride in the listing. A tree can shade and decorate, cheer and console. It can become part of a household.
    As Mark Torok, senior forester in the Florida Division of Forestry, says, “People like big trees. A tree is a living creature, some of them ancient, and they grow in their own ways. There’s a gumbo limbo in Homestead, second biggest in the state, that looks like a sea serpent.”
    Torok showed up in Bunting’s driveway awhile back to measure the geiger, using a hypsometer to triangulate height and crown spread and to declare, at the time, “You’re No. 2.” No. 1 lived, then, on Sanibel Island.
    When that tree gave up the ghost, Bunting’s geiger ascended into the pantheon of Big Trees, joining the likes of a pond cypress in Longwood, the state’s biggest tree at 125 feet up and 17½ feet around and nicknamed the Senator; and General Sherman, a California sequoia more than 2,300 years old and considered by some, at 275 feet high and 1,910 tons, the largest living thing on Earth (if you don’t count root-linked and genetically identical aspens in Colorado and a gargantuan fungus, mostly underground, in Oregon).
    In Bunting‘s yard, the orange geiger is half-entwined with a flowering frangipani and rivaled in height  by a slim and sturdy Lignum vitae that Bunting planted with his own hands and by a massive and outreaching live oak, which, on this mid-fall morning, is giving two squirrels a view of the owner’s tree tour. The geiger has kept a few of its flowers, and its leaves, ovate and pinnate and rough to the touch, look abundantly green.
    “This is a hardwood, and they grow very slowly,” Bunting is saying. “Wait’ll you see it when all the orange flowers are out. It’s beautiful. I didn’t want people driving in the driveway, so I let the limbs keep on a-growin’.”
He proves a first-rate guide. Bunting taught science in Lake Worth Middle School and in Delray Beach and West Palm and Miami, and he still volunteers at Boca’s Gumbo Limbo Nature Center.
    Home has been his harbor, and the orange geiger is one of its anchors. 
    He also appreciates how his trees live and share. The squirrels love the live oak because it showers them in acorns. The orange geiger, for its flowers, is the preferred perch of another, rarer, more colorful life form: hummingbirds. Bunting wishes they would find this one. “I’ve only seen one hummingbird in all the years I’ve been here,” he says. This geiger is not, apparently, on the hummingbird’s migratory flight plan.
    It is, though, on the National Register of Big Trees and likely to stay there, for a good many years. If he sells the house, Bunting says, the buyer must promise to preserve and protect the tree.  

LEFT: (front) Norma Dagher and Gina  Brady with (back) Penny Kosinski and Sylvie Bergeron attended the Junior League of Boca Raton’s annual luncheon on Oct. 6.  Lu-Lu Thomas of the Boca Raton Historical Museum was name  Volunteer of the Year.

RIGHT: Wearing hats at the luncheon to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Junior League are (l-r) Heidi Sargeant, Carla Martin, Deborah Sargeant, Shelly Sipp, Monique Javarone and Mary Katharine.

Photos by Tim Stepien

By Deborah S. Hartz-Seeley

The Sandoway House Nature Center is the starting point for the first Sandoway House Blue Water 5K Run and 1K Doggie Walk on Nov. 12 in Delray Beach.
    “We couldn’t think of a better way to have people see the center and be exposed to all it has to offer,” says Michael Kravit of Boca Raton, president of the center’s board and the organizer of this event.
    All the proceeds will benefit the not-for-profit nature center that is home to live sharks, lizards, snakes, turtles, tortoises and tarantulas, as well as a collection of 10,000 shells (only about 20 percent are on display at one time) and a butterfly garden of native plants.
    And through Jan. 15, there’s an exhibit of Ice Age fossils from animals that roamed Florida from 10,000 to 1.8 million years ago.
    “We need to preserve our natural history and the natural beauty of Florida’s ecosystems,” says executive director Patrick Morehouse. 
    There’s human history here, too. The center’s home was built in 1936 and placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2002.
    You can enter the nature center through its screened front porch where you’ll be greeted by Crystal, a talking macaw with vibrant blue, green and yellow plumage — one of several orphan animals that have been adopted by the center.
    Here, you can also find Gigi, a Florida box turtle, eating a plate of scrambled eggs. Volunteer Marilyn Toftsted discovered the animal likes the eggs one day when she was eating breakfast. So now she makes them especially for Gigi.
    You’ll also meet Speedy, a gopher tortoise. On our visit, we found him sitting on his plate, having devoured corn on the cob, strawberries, spinach, sweet potatoes and yellow squash topped with an orange hibiscus bloom. “It looks like garnish, but he really eats it,” says Toftsted, who has volunteered at the center for more than five years.
    In a small plastic pool here on the porch, you’ll find Sam the box turtle and Custard, a soft-shell turtle. Morehouse hopes to release Sam back into the wild in the next few months.
    And don’t miss the sharks. You’ll find them swimming with other fish in a 15,000-gallon coral reef tank that started life as the house’s in-ground swimming pool. Morehouse explains that it was altered to stand up to the stresses of salt water and wildlife.
    Today it’s home to a spotfin burrfish or puffer fish; blue runners that are quick-swimming members of the jack family and grunt fish. These look bright with their yellow and blue horizontal stripes and black vertical accents.
    But the biggest attraction is the three small nurse sharks.
    As Morehead tosses chunks of Spanish sardines, shelled clams and squid, the fish gather at one end of the pool. Each shark gets about two pounds of food a day, he says.
    While the other fish are quiet and polite, the sharks grab for their food. Their mouths form a vacuum that results in a sucking noise, explains Morehouse.  It’s this sound — like a nursing child — that got them their name.
    The largest shark is Miss Barbie, a teenager that’s about four feet long. She’s also the favorite of Kate Graham, 10, who is visiting with her mother and two brothers from Switzerland.
    Morehouse tells the group that if you have been swimming off the beach in South Florida, you’ve probably been near a shark.
    Tom Delfer, a student at FAU who is here as part of his classwork, takes great interest in Morehouse’s shark talk. 
“I’ve have been swimming around sharks for a long time. And now I learn they aren’t threatening. It’s nice to hear,” he says.
    It’s also nice to get to tour this building that was built as a home for J.B. Evans, a produce broker who spent winters in the sunny south. Constructed during the Great Depression, it was designed by Samuel Ogren Sr., the city’s first registered architect.
    “He set the style for Delray Beach. He was a trailblazer,” says Roger Cope, a local architect involved with historic preservation and a member of the Delray Beach Historical Society. “Boca Raton and Palm Beach had [architect Addison] Mizner, but thank goodness we had Ogren,” he adds.
    In the formal dining room of the house, you’ll find copies of historic drawings and old photos dating from when the house was built. It included four bedrooms, three bathrooms, a living room, dining room and two sun decks.
    It is one of the last resort colonial revival houses left in Delray Beach. It features  board and batten siding, double-hung windows and a second-story porch from which you can see the ocean and feel the refreshing breezes. It still has its original Dade County pine floors and ceilings.
    “Ogren brought sophistication to a relatively simple community,” says Cope. “He gave us our first taste of affluence and style.”
    When the county took over this property, it was one of the last resort colonial revival style houses in the area. “People wanted to save it,” says Tofsted.
Those people formed The Friends of Sandoway House Nature Center and raised $1 million to purchase the house and pay for renovations and operating expenses.
    The Friends asked Kravit, of Kravit Architectural Associates in Boca Raton, to help with the restoration, which began in 1996. “When we started, the place was a mess,” says Kravit, who volunteered his services. But after removing lead paint, rotten wood and the additions people had made over time, it was returned it to its historic best.
    Then the county leased the property to the nature center, which opened in 1998.
     “Here you not only get an education about nature but also get to see a historic home,” says Suzanne Mjolsness, who was visiting the center from Iowa with her husband and parents. “I’m glad we came.”

IF YOU GO
The Sandoway House Blue Water Run takes off from the Sandoway House Nature Center, 142 S. Ocean Blvd., Delray Beach, at 7 a.m. Nov. 12. The 1K Doggie Dash begins at 7:30 a.m. They will be followed by a healthful breakfast at nearby Caffe Luna Rosa and complimentary admission to the nature center.
The run is $35; the Doggie Dash, $25. All proceeds benefit the nature center. To register, visit www.AccuChip Timing.com (click on the Event Calendar and then the date). For information, call 274-7263.
The Sandoway House (www.sandowayhouse.org) is open Tuesday through Sunday. Shark feedings are at 10:30 a.m. Tuesday through Saturday and 1:30 Sunday. There’s a fossil talk at 2 p.m. Friday. There’s a $4 entry donation requested.

By Thomas R. Collins

    The call came at 2:20 a.m. My mom was about to die.
    I’d been preparing for this for the last two years. But I still felt as though a trapdoor was about to open beneath me.
                                                    • • •
    Fifteen hours earlier, my mom, Susan Clara Nivens, who had severe dementia, had been assigned a nurse from Hospice of Palm Beach County to sit at her bedside around the clock at the nursing home. Her swallowing mechanism had totally broken down, probably leading to a lung infection. Plus, her gastrointestinal system was shutting down. These were all telltale signs of coming death.
    I’d had the options of bringing my mom home or admitting her to a hospice center. But a move would have been stressful for her, and the medical staff had convinced me that it was not worth the risk.
    That evening, the nurse said that my mom, on a morphine drip, was comfortable. In her notes, she’d said my mom was unresponsive. When I told my mom, “I love you,” she managed to make sounds, low but audible, back to me. The nurse added, “Responds to son.”
    Her vital signs were still pretty good and the nurse said she didn’t think anything would happen overnight, although she couldn’t guarantee it. I left at 6:15 p.m. to have dinner at home, expecting that in a day or two I’d start a 24-hour death vigil.
    Then the call came. My wife and I bolted. It was early morning on Wednesday, Oct. 19.
    When we arrived, my mom’s breathing was much louder and more irregular than before. Her eyes were now wide open. The hand I was holding was limp. Her fingertips were cool and pale blue under the nails.
    “I’d be nothing without you,” I told her, staring into her eyes. I said this kind of thing over and over. I called my mom’s two sisters and they talked to her on speakerphone.
    I believe my mom heard everything.
    Then, suddenly, her breaths grew quiet and shallow, with long pauses between them. I kissed her cheeks and forehead. The hair on the crown of her head was sticking up and I tried to comb it flat with my fingers, but I couldn’t.
    At the nurse’s request, I left the room so she could give my mom a Tylenol suppository for her fever.
    Three minutes later, the nurse came out to tell me my mom had died.
    I gently closed her eyes. I removed the oxygen tube from her nose. I caressed her hair. I touched her cool hands, then found warmer skin farther up her arm. She did not seem dead yet to me, but half-dead and half-alive. But I instantly knew a phase of grief had begun that would continue, to a degree, throughout my lifetime. I cried and cried.
                                                                                                        • • •
    I had taken refuge in my mom even through the end stages of her dementia.
    In the few weeks before my son, Quinn, was born in March, my wife and I, like children, exchanged some harsh words one night after I got her takeout order wrong. I had become jittery about the coming birth and had gotten maddeningly forgetful as a result. I’ve always been scatterbrained, but this was worse.
    After the argument, I drove to my mom’s nursing home. I arrived at a quiet time, about 9 p.m., when almost all the residents were in their small, quiet, dark rooms.
My mom awoke and gave me a flicker of pleased recognition. I told her I was worried I wouldn’t be a good father to the baby. I shed a few tears.
    I hadn’t needed my mom at full capacity for comfort. Just her presence.
                                                                                                         • • •
    The funeral in Baltimore brought together family and friends, many of whom had not seen each other in years.
    Since then, I’ve been mostly poised, but sometimes weep uncontrollably when alone.
    Most often, I am numb and disoriented, feeling that part of me has been marooned, like an astronaut left adrift in space.
    In addition to all the work and love my mom gave me, I like to think she has given me one more gift, bestowed right at the very end.
    I have always been afraid of dying. But now, I’ve seen death literally occur, except for that very last moment. Because I’ve seen it so close, it’s more known. And the known is always less frightening than the unknown. I’m still afraid of dying, but definitely less so.
    Who else could have prepared me? Who else will I likely see die, close-up, in my lifetime? Quite possibly, no one.
    My mom, by letting me see her die, has helped ease that fear.
    As only she could.        

Editors Note:  Thomas R. Collins has been sharing the final days of his mother’s life in an occassional series. Read these stories (I, II, III, IV) and his funeral eulogy.

PHOTO ABOVE: Thomas R. Collins dances with his mother, Susan Clara Nivens, at his wedding in June 2009.  Family Photo